Here's the best thing about Codemasters' FPS Bodycount: instant restarts. Should you be the unfortunate recipient of a minigun volley to the kneecaps, your character will have barely hit the ground before you've slapped A and are tearing back into battle from the last checkpoint. Even the quicker respawning FPS games such as Halo and Call of Duty can't resist a lingering camera over your fallen body or a heady wartime quote. A few games could learn a lesson from Bodycount: don't interrupt me when I'm trying to save the world.

However, the instant restarts aren't just the best thing about Bodycount, on occasion they can be the game's only saving grace. Death comes thick, fast and often unexpected among the messy bluster of Bodycount's action. At times it can be a war of attrition, frustration barely kept at bay by that precious, precious instant restart.

It's such a shame, as Bodycount has some lovely ideas and execution in its core shooting. Guns are weighty and give out a primal roar with every bullet fired. Enemies are catapulted back on ballistic interference with comical velocity. The visual palate is colourful and vivid. The soundtrack is wonderfully judged. And here's another one of my favourite Bodycount things: impact grenades. Double tap the grenade throw button and your ordnance will explode on impact. It's deeply satisfying to launch a grenade into a group of enemies and send them flying, like dropping a large rock into a pond and watching the splash.

Unfortunately, throughout the game these assets are wasted on muddled arenas and an identity crisis. Bodycount sets itself up as a straight-forward arcade blaster, but can't quite let go of that Call of Duty grit and visual spectacle. There are combo awards for headshots and grenade kills that rack up a score multiplier that resets after a 'normal' kill, but it's implementation feels half-hearted, almost apologetic in the face of EA's riotous FPS Bulletstorm and its terrific skill-shots.

While any game could have learned a lesson from the instant restarts (did I mention they were glorious), Bodycount would have done well to take heed of Bulletstorm. Bodycount should have been a similar style of FPS-as-racing game, finding that perfect line through straightforward levels, racking up points in a ferocious ballet of bullets. But instead you are often dropped into confused, wide-open levels as enemy soldiers converge on you from all directions. It's chaos in lieu of level design from then on, with the mechanics of Bodycount ill-suited to handle such mess. For instance, the game's other innovation is a neat lean mechanic. As you squeeze the left trigger to aim down the sight of your gun, you become rooted to the spot. From there you can aim as normal with the right stick, but the left stick acts as a pivot, allowing you to lean round corners and sneakily pick off enemies from a hidden position. The problem is that, for large swathes of the game, the mechanic just doesn't fit into the levels. Often you will be forced into open ground with nothing to hide behind, which makes the lean mechanic useless. While you can move while aiming by half-pressing the trigger, it's an unsatisfactory solution in the midst of Bodycount's bombast. And with the feedback for the damage you have taken being too opaque, frustration can easily set in. That, or you end up just dashing for the next waypoint and avoiding conflict, which is hardly a recommendation for a game trying to put the fun back in gunplay.

Other quirks attempt to add flavour. Fallen enemies drop glowing orbs that can be vacuumed up to increase your 'intel', which powers an energy meter in the left corner used to enable a handful of special powers. Adrenaline gives you a brief spell of invulnerability, while explosive bullets are as self-explanatory as they sound. These two work fine, particularly the Adrenaline boost, which can give you a thrilling window to survive an all-out onslaught. The other two are less useful. An airstrike delivers massive area damage, but is usually only available during boss fights, while a power that highlights enemies in blue is just a bit pointless.

The enemy AI is erratic too. Occasionally they'll flank and swarm as a cohesive unit, but just as often they'll stand right in front of you without registering that you are there, turn their back on the firefight for no discernible reason and, in a few cases, stare dumbfounded at the floor.

It's a curious comedy of errors that shrouds an otherwise ok shooter. There's not a great deal of variation in the measly four hour running time, but there are moments when everything seems to come together. The story --such as it is-- has you as a "Network" operative, the Network being a shady organisation that involves itself in global conflict and tries to save the world on its own terms. You've been dropped into an African civil war, though you don't discriminate over which side you take your bullets to; the government or the rebel militia. However it becomes clear that all is not what it seems and you soon uncover the cause of the war: the Target organisation. Target are a bunch of warmongers who share a wardrobe with Star Wars Imperial troops and hide away in hi-tech bases which they name the Nexus.

It's inside each Nexus that Bodycount begins to make sense. Closing the action into tightly confined corridors actually brings the best out of the game. The lean mechanic works here, as you hunker behind glowing Tron-esque cover and peak around corners. Everything explodes in a colourful shower of sparks and Target bodies. Tense dashes against the clock give a sense of meaning and urgency sorely lacking elsewhere in the game. In the Nexus, Bodycountworks. The level design dovetails with the mechanics. And while Bodycount never really does enough to win you over completely, the game hits its stride towards the end.

It's then a shame that the good stuff is all so fleeting within an already short game. When the campaign is done and dusted, there's a serviceable if perfunctory competitive multiplayer, with Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and that's it, and a co-op survival mode. You can replay each campaign mission individually to try and post high scores on a leaderboard in Bodycount mode, but it's nothing more than a level select.

Bodycount just feels slightly out of step. It professes to be a reaction to overblown, scripted rollercoaster FPSes, but never manages to bring a whole lot to the table for itself. Bodycount even makes a fuss over destructible cover, which was done better by Battlefield Bad Company. Bodycount is not a poor game, just a confused and unremarkable one, even if those instant restarts really are wonderful.